In Awe of Atlantis

This is the orca in the Seattle airport as we started our trip!

Yay for Atlantis!

We made it to ATLANTIS!!!!!!

Our room!

We made it to Atlantis and Bob loves the big TV!

Our bathroom was pretty nice too

The ginormous bed!

View out of our room--the big pool is where the dolphins live!

Dinner at Johnny Rockets
Bob loves his hamburger!


After our dolphin adventure! Sweet wetsuits, huh? :)

So we're back! Hurricane Paloma avoided us and the sun shone on and the balmy 80 degree weather continued and we seriously had the best vacation ever! We can't wait to go back!!!!!!!!! Atlantis made every other vacation in the universe pale in comparison.... there's no way to really explain the opulence of the entire property or the awesomeness of the waterpark... So yes, we enjoyed the heck out of this trip!

On the downside.... when we got back to the U.S. I had a message from our alarm company that the alarm had gone off, so I called them back and they weren't very helpful and could only say that it had gone off and they sent police when we didn't call back. I asked if the police found anything and they said they didn't know because the police hadn't called them back. So this led us to wonder if there were robbers looting our place.... Luckily when we arrived home we found it was still there and intact, but all the smoke alarms were going off! Not the security alarm though... so did they set off the other alarm? Who knows. We figured out this morning why all the smoke alarms were going off though... they're hard wired and one of them was full of water, so we're thinking that set off all the others too.... So apparently there's a leak in our ceiling! Bob climbed up on the roof and sealed that whole area with another layer of sealant over the shingles so hopefully no more water gets in but hopefully not too much got in in the first place! Next problem: NO HEAT! A few days before we left the furnace quit and our house was freezing so we had the furnace people come out and fix it and they replaced the ignition basically for it and it was not cheap of course. We came home from the Bahamas to find a FREEZING house (which was very loud from the smoke alarms)! So they came out today and it was the same thing--for some reason the new part he'd installed had already stopped working, so he replaced it again, for NO CHARGE of course.... hopefully this is the end of our heating issues! So yes, it's been an interesting return home.

Other fun news, we picked up Lilo from the kennel today and she was sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo happy to be home!!! She whimpered and licked and wagged her tail and nuzzled the whole drive home and it was very sweet to see how much she missed us, although it made us feel really bad for leaving her so long! At least we won't be ditching her for a long time again!

I will post pictures soon.... I took close to 300 I think, so it will be tough to choose! They wouldn't let us take our camera in for our dolphin encounter so we had to pay the big bucks to buy their pic of us, so I'll scan that in. We also forgot our camera charger somehow, so thank goodness for my iPhone! I took about 1/2 the pics on there while trying to conserve camera battery life!

Hope you're all well and thanks to everyone for the calls, emails, texts, and cards for my birthday! It was WONDERFUL! Thanks and have a great day!
~Cathy
P.S. There are a LOT of pictures to post and I've already spent WAY too much time today doing this, so enjoy these for now and I'll keep adding more over the next few days. :)

Heading to my birthday dinner!


Birthday dinner at Carmines!

Bob in front of the arch!

This giant seahorse door was awesome!

Happy Halloween!

So last night was the annual Halloween party for work and we also stopped at the Trunk or Treat for church and it was great fun. (Although our ward trunk or treat was ridiculously brief! Has anyone else ever had a ward that just does it for 20 minutes and then everyone leaves??? Weird. Our prior wards always have had great fall carnival kind of setups inside with food, games for the kids, etc )

We got the idea for our costumes by looking online last year... I just googled do-it-yourself costumes and saw several cute ideas, but liked this one, so when we couldn't come up with an idea this year I suggested it. At first Bob was resistant, because how manly are grapes? But then he caved and the fun began. It was so simple.... we just blew up balloons and pinned them to purple and green shirts respectively, then slipped them on! (I should clarify that really BOB did all the work--the balloons were all blown up and attached when I got home from work!) It worked great! Here we are in all our grapey glory!

The costumes before we put them on:

I laughed so hard at the pile of costumes that I had to put it on as soon as I got home! So here I am as the Army grape. :)

As we were walking into Jesse's house for the party, there was a herd of trick or treaters, including a banana! So I made the scared little girl be in a picture with me so we could be fruit salad! How hilarious is that? Sorry for the poor picture quality... our camera sucks. We REALLY need to get a new one before our big trip!

Here's the full glory of the grapes: (Although I'd already lost 3 at this point thanks to the rose bush I had to squeeze by on my way up to the door! They were REALLY loud pops and scared the trick or treaters!)

These pictures don't really give you any idea of the lower half... so here are my fun purple tights and slippers! :) (Sorry to disappoint, but Bob made it clear EARLY on that he was NOT wearing tights no matter what our costume choice was!)

There were a lot of fun costumes last night, but Cheree and Buddha were especially cute. Serious kudos to Cheree for still fitting in her high school cheerleading outfit too! I'm not sure I could fit into much from high school other than shoes! Also very impressive that she managed to turn a 3T outfit from Ross into a dog costume!

This picture won't mean too much to some, but it was HILARIOUS last night. Charles was having a bit of spillage trouble. He got some chili and promptly spilled as he was dishing up. Then he came over by my seat and was getting utensils and was tipping his bowl a bit too much and spilled more. Then, jokingly he sat down at Roland's high chair to eat... so of course I had to get a picture. :)

As silly as that was, it didn't end there, because high chairs are meant to be stable for the BABY sitting in them, not the grown adult pretending from the other side.... so a little lean and SPLASH.... Charles' chili was all over the place (spill #3) so another picture had to be taken. He went on to have at least 1 more spill before we left, but the night was still young! :) Here's Angela being a faithful wife and helping him clean up a bit.

Most importantly of all, the dogs had fun together. No one scared anyone else too much, the all played nice, Jesse's carpet was not marred, and they were all adorable! From left to right you've got Cheree and Buddha, Angela and Jaloosie, and of course Lilo and I. If you've forgotten or can't tell from this picture, Lilo is a lobster. :) Jaloosie is clearly a jack-o-lantern, and Buddha is obviously a football player. I have removed my grapes due their massive size (I now have some insight into how difficult it is for the morbidly obese to move around).

Hope you all had a great Halloween! If you haven't already posted your Halloween pics, get em up there! You know you want to share, and you know we all love seing them!

Anyone with camera advice is welcome to share... we love our sony cybershot for it's size and it generally does well in good light, but no matter what setting we use at night or in low light it does TERRIBLE. Also, as several of these pics demonstrate, it puts weird dots all over the picture. (No matter how many times we clean the lens!) Annoying. And the darkness is not adequately fixed by a Photoshop novice like myself... so most of these pics are further weirded by my lazy self just using the quick fix features to brighten a bit. So basically, I want a compact camera with a nice screen on the back so you can see what you're doing, but with faster brighter night time capabilities.

I don't think Bob was as entertained, but I thought it was hilarious how our shirts looked after we unpinned all the safety pins with balloons!

The carnage after we popped and removed all the balloons. Maybe the neighbors thought we were shooting things. :)

We also had dinner with Bob's Aunt Barbara and Uncle David on Wednesday night, which was great! We met them up at Maggiano's in Bellevue because they were staying in Bothel for their son's change of command ceremony for a ship in Everett. (He's a commander in the Navy) I had never met them before and as they live in South Carolina, Bob has only seen them a handful of times, so it was really nice to spend a few hours with them! They're a very nice couple and unfortunately due to camera snafus involving their batteries being dead and ours being forgotten, the only evidence of the event was from the iphone. Again, low lighting, the nemesis of the non D90 level of camera!

Speaking of iPhone photos: We also went to Cabela's and REI this week to obtain our water shoes for the Bahamas trip and were entertained as always by the dead zoo at Cabela's. Other sporting goods stores in the area started running radio ads knocking the dead zoo soon after our Cabela's opened, but obviously they're just jealous. :) I just realized this post is getting ridiculously huge, so I'll only put a few more photos from this stop, but the most entertaining things were:

1. The zebra overlooking the merchandise. WHY? Is he really a security guard on the look out for shoplifters?

2. The gun "library." That phrase alone entertains me, and the price of some of these guns were nuts. Not as impressive as the Post Falls Cabela though, which had some CRAZY elephant guns... YIKES! This one was priced at almost $45,000 if you can't read that tag! Whoah!

I enjoyed the kitty on this shotgun :)

Bob enjoyed all the guns for sale just outside the library!

3. The pictures say it all :)

Ok, that's quite a bit longer than I should have spent blogging! Time to go work on my pulm presentation, run, then hopefully have some time to work on my Christmas cards or scrapbooking! On the sickness front, I'm feeling better, but coughing much more, but Bob has a scratchy throat today... hopefully it goes faster for him than it did for me! Have a great weekend.

~Cathy